Are They Empowered Yet?: Opening Up Definitions of Critical Pedagogy

Heather Thomson-Bunn

Abstract: Approaching definitions (and the act of defining) as inherently political and ideological, this article argues that there is a lack of definitional precision surrounding critical pedagogy and its core terms (e.g., student empowerment). This lack of precision can impede the successful and ethical implementation of critical pedagogy in the composition classroom. This article calls for a deeper articulation of what critical pedagogy is and does, and for sharing definitional power with students by enlisting their help in this articulation. Inviting students to participate in such definitional work may mitigate resistance by offering students a greater say, and a greater stake, in their own education. Defining these terms more precisely may also help instructors to enact and communicate critical pedagogy in a more open and purposeful way.

Before
I started graduate school, I had never heard the term “critical
pedagogy.” Over a decade later, I sometimes forget that not
everyone considers it a lexical staple. I began graduate school as
an MFA student directly out of college, and I was nervous about
teaching the section of first-year composition I’d been assigned as
a new Teaching Assistant. Along with the other newcomers, I was
given a three-day crash course in composition pedagogy before classes
started. When the semester commenced, and we’d been thrown into
the swimming pool, so to speak, we all attended a weekly teaching
seminar throughout our first full year, in which we were introduced
to critical pedagogy and developed our own teaching practices. By
the end of that year, I was more confident. I could talk about
student empowerment. I never lectured my class. I tossed Paulo
Freire’s name around like I’d always known it. I felt that I was
doing a relatively good job.

It
was only as my academic focus shifted from fiction writing to
composition studies that I learned how complicated—and how
contested—a notion “critical pedagogy” really was. And though
critical pedagogy (as both a term and an approach to teaching) has
been used in composition circles for decades, it continues to be a
source of debate, particularly as it relates to ideology and student
resistance. Gwen Gorzelsky acknowledges this
contested status in her 2009 article Working Boundaries: From
Student Resistance to Student Agency:

Composition studies’ use of critical pedagogy to
promote equity and social justice has been fundamentally called into
question. The issue is students’ resistance to this pedagogy, as
documented by scholars such as Jeff Smith, Russell [sic] K. Durst,
David Seitz, Jennifer Trainor, and David L. Wallace and Helen
Rothschild Ewald (64).

Gorzelsky
notes how Smith urges instructors to set aside their “ideological
agendas in favor of students’ instrumentalist goals” and mentions
that Durst “advocates making students’ pragmatic,
professionalizing goals central to our courses” (64-65). Trainor,
according to Gorzelsky, “retains a stronger commitment to critical
pedagogy’s core concerns and contends that student resistance stems
not from instructors’ unethical commitment to those concerns but
from teachers’ inadequate attention to how critical pedagogy
positions students as readers and writers” (65). Durst puts the
matter plainly in a 2006 CCC Interchange
when he writes, “[C]ritical pedagogy has been part of composition
for nearly twenty years now. It's fair to ask: At what point are you
no longer blundering for a change? At what point are you simply
blundering?” (“Can” 111).

Despite these legitimate concerns, abandoning critical
pedagogy altogether seems too extreme a reaction to the difficult and
complicated ethical questions that sometimes accompany it. After
all, critical pedagogy does not always lead
to “blundering.” For example, Gorzelsky’s
ethnographic study of a writing course taught by “a particularly
talented instructor who integrated process and critical pedagogy
approaches” led her to conclude that “critical pedagogy doesn’t
automatically provoke students’ resistance” (66). In
Understanding Problems in Critical Classrooms, William Thelin
rejects scholarly objections to critical pedagogy, writing, “Recent
scholarship in critical pedagogy would lead us to believe that
perceived failure in implementing liberatory goals taints those goals
and makes them unworthy. In other words, when students do not respond
to the pedagogy in a way that we conclude is positive, we should find
new goals” (115). He goes on to ask, “Why
must the goal fall in disfavor when the pedagogy appears not to have
worked? Is there another way we can look at
failure to use it productively toward strengthening critical pedagogy
and its goals?” (117).

In this article I’d like to discuss what I see as one major failure
of critical pedagogy—not to hammer another nail in its supposed
coffin, but to work in conjunction with Thelin’s aim of
“strengthening critical pedagogy and its goals.” The failure I’m
addressing here is not one of ideological commitments, but of
definitional precision and transparency. What troubled me as a
graduate student studying composition theory, and what continues to
trouble me now, is that it can be difficult to discern exactly how
certain elements of critical pedagogy—for example, a notion like
“student empowerment”—are being defined.

Before
discussing this problem in more detail, it may be valuable to examine
a number of definitions; by doing so, we can identify significant
commonalities among them that reveal some of the underlying (often
political) aims of critical pedagogy. These definitions highlight
the collaborative, anti-authoritarian model of classroom learning
that is a key component in most articulations of critical pedagogy.
I have put words in bold that reflect several of the key terms and
ideas that accompany critical pedagogy:

Critical pedagogy is not about polemics or preaching
one's politics in the classroom. Rather, it involves authorizing
students to share responsibility for
their education while posing problems based in students' collective
experience in the world around them. Critical pedagogues challenge
the status quo both in content and
method.~William Thelin (Response 117-118)

[C]ritical pedagogy can promote multicultural
education and sensitivity to cultural difference . . . [It] involves
teaching the skills that will empower
citizens and students to become
sensitive to the politics of representations of race, ethnicity,
gender, class, and other cultural differences in order to empower
individuals and promote democratization.~Douglas Kellner (1)

[C]ritical pedagogy is not simply concerned with offering
students new ways to think critically and to act with authority as
agents in the classroom;
it is also concerned with providing students with the skills and
knowledge necessary for them to expand their capacities both to
question deep-seated assumptions and
myths that legitimate the most archaic and disempowering social
practices that structure every aspect
of society and to take responsibility for intervening in the world
they inhabit.~Henry Giroux (2)

The
students—no longer docile listeners—are now critical
co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher . . . education, as
a humanist and liberating praxis, posits
as fundamental that the people subjected to domination must fight for
their emancipation. To that end, it enables
teachers and students to become subjects
of the educational process by overcoming
authoritarianism and an alienating
intellectualism.~Paulo Freire (81, 86)

The
primary preoccupation of critical pedagogy is with social
injustice and how to transform inequitable, undemocratic,
or oppressive institutions and social relations.~Nicholas Burbules & Rupert Berk (47)

In just
these few definitions, many of the core terms of critical pedagogy
come into focus: student empowerment, social justice, liberation,
democracy, and responsible citizenship. These are the abstractions
that lurk in the corners of our classrooms. All reach beyond what
many people (including students) might define as aspects of good
writing, all have a sociopolitical dimension, and all might be
imagined and enacted in vastly different ways.

The
general sentiment represented by definitions of critical pedagogy
(such as those presented above) seems to be that a social/political
agenda is a natural element of critical pedagogy, as critical
pedagogy is often conceived in relation to social and political
problems. In his book Who Can Afford Critical
Consciousness?, David Seitz writes:

Although there have been overlapping strands of critical
pedagogy in college writing classes over the past fifteen years,
teachers influenced by these ideas all hold one assumption in
common. All of them believe the educational system, to varying
degrees, promotes the cultural reproduction of social and economic
injustice (5).

Christine
Sleeter, in her book Multicultural Education
as Social Activism, writes that “critical
pedagogy rests on the assumption that society faces a crisis of grave
proportions that impacts very disparately on different groups”
(124)—a statement that makes apparent how foundational
sociopolitical considerations are to critical pedagogy. Remove that
foundation, and the structure collapses.

When
we discuss critical pedagogy, then, we are usually talking about a
theory that moves beyond the walls of the academy and does so as part
of its central purpose. The definitions above point to critical
pedagogy not merely as a way to transform classroom practice, but as
a way to transform society. Given the gravity and far-reaching
nature of this goal, we have a responsibility to examine and
re-examine what we do, and to articulate this goal in a way that is
accessible to those directly influenced by it. As James Berlin
writes, “We cannot help influencing our students, but we can do all
we can to be straightforward about our methods and motives” (180).

Yet,
the current discourse of critical pedagogy circulates almost
exclusively among academics; students rarely play an active role in
defining key terms and ideas. The aims of
critical pedagogy, reaching beyond conventional notions of “writing
instruction” to sociopolitical transformation, make that
exclusivity problematic. Much of the discourse of critical pedagogy
revolves around a core of large, abstract ideas such as social
justice, student empowerment, co-construction of knowledge, and
critical thinking. This is not a problem in and of itself, but what
happens when these ideas are brought into the concrete world of the
composition classroom? Articulating these terms more precisely for
ourselves may also help us to enact and communicate critical pedagogy
in our classrooms in a more open and purposeful way. Inviting
students to participate in such definitional work as well may
mitigate resistance by offering students a greater say, and a greater
stake, in their own education. After all, several of the definitions
suggest that students and teachers are undertaking this critical
enterprise together,
with students sharing “responsibility for their education” and
acting “with authority as agents in the classroom.”

Whether
we want it or not, we have a certain degree (I’d argue a high
degree) of power over our students, by virtue of being the ones who
get to define critical pedagogy and all that it entails.{1}
Definitions, by nature, are political, “affirm[ing] or deny[ing]
specific interests and encourag[ing] particular linguistic and
nonlinguistic behaviors” (Schiappa 68). It follows, then, that the
person or persons who do the defining are the ones who wield the
power of determining these linguistic and nonlinguistic interests and
behaviors. It is worth examining (and better defining) some of the
core terms of critical pedagogy, because they are typically worthy
notions that nonetheless can make for a rocky transition from theory
to practice. Though they sound unproblematic and easily agreed
upon—who, after all, is against “critical thinking”?—they are
politicized terms that do “affirm or deny” specific interests.
Give the egalitarian goals of critical pedagogy, it is imperative to
expose and interrogate these interests.

In this article, I first explore the significance of definitional power
and demonstrate how such power, when retained solely by instructors,
can undermine the goals of critical pedagogues. Next, I examine how
definitions can shape classroom practice and students’ response to
critical pedagogy. I then consider how the political dimension of
composition complicates the notion of sharing definitional power with
our students. Finally, I suggest that our perspectives on
redistributing definitional power are shaped by the way we define our
students, and propose building upon David Walton and Helen Rothschild
Ewald’s notion of “mutuality” to begin working together with
students to define key critical terms. In this article I argue for a
deeper articulation of what critical pedagogy is and does, and for
student involvement in this articulation. By “deeper,” I mean an
exploration that reaches down beneath the surface of familiar words—a
liquid articulation that seeps between the hard, rooted definitional
teeth of theory to the more tender, vulnerable places, to the nerves
and blood vessels that sit below, holding everything up.

Definitional Power

In order to examine the language of critical pedagogy, we need first to
recognize the definitional power that critical pedagogues hold over
that language, and to tease out the ramifications of that power.
Many composition courses introduce students to concepts such as
“critical thinking,” and this generally means that students are
introduced—implicitly or explicitly—to what their teacher has
decided that being “critical” means. Like any discourse, the
discourse of critical pedagogy “implies an author”—it is an act shaped by certain motivations and “certain characteristics of the
language user[s]” (Black 110). Students are, of course, “language
users,” but they are not the ones creating and disseminating the
discourse, which is perplexing in light of critical pedagogy’s
emphasis on student voice and empowerment. The foundational language
of critical pedagogy—and more significantly, the meanings of that foundational language—is governed
primarily by faculty members. If teachers retain sole control over
the definitional language of their pedagogy, that control may limit
the extent to which education acts as a force of liberation and
empowerment.

It
is important to step back for a moment to point out an apparent
contradiction: I’ve both claimed that critical pedagogy is a
“given,” and that we don’t engage in sufficient definitional
work around it, and offered several (of many) printed definitions. I
wish to make a few distinctions here for the purposes of this
discussion. First, the fact that these definitions are often printed
but rarely verbalized (especially to students) keeps the definitions
relegated to a relatively small group of people who read
these publications. In other words, we are seldom called upon to
define the term for people outside of the field, and can therefore
adopt what Edward Schiappa would call a “natural attitude” toward
the definition (30). We make an assumption of general consensus, at
least within our discourse community. When we consider that our
students (and some instructors as well{2})
are outside of this discourse community—a consideration that I will
pursue in more depth below—the consequences of that attitude become more
obvious.

I also want to approach definitions of critical pedagogy
as what Douglas Walton would call persuasive
definitions. Persuasive definitions involve both the descriptive
meaning of words (i.e., the factual/descriptive content of a word)
and the emotive
meaning of words (i.e., the feelings/attitudes that a word suggests
or evokes). Persuasive definitions allow for “redefining the
descriptive meaning of the word while covertly retaining its old
familiar emotive meaning” (Walton 118). Viewing definitions as
persuasive removes the façade of neutrality from the language we
use, and it also reveals the fact that definitions are not
necessarily fixed or benign. The definition of “critical
pedagogy,” for example, is generally traced back to Paulo Freire,
who grew up in poverty and worked with Brazilian peasants; when he
talked of a “liberating pedagogy,” he meant liberation in a sense
that does not mesh with the lived experience of most Americans in
higher education. In fact, in his Introduction to Freire’s
Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
Donald Macedo contrasts “Freire’s denunciation of oppression”
to the “intellectual exercise that we often find among many facile
liberals and pseudo-critical educators” (12). The emotive meaning
of critical pedagogy (the struggle for liberation by oppressed,
impoverished peasants) is retained, while the descriptive meaning (an
approach to teaching that offers students a voice in their own
education) has been redefined according to history and context. In
other words, the term critical pedagogy still
has the power to call up feelings of revolution and resistance, of
the disenfranchised critiquing a system that has excluded them,
whether or not this is what is actually happening in writing
classrooms. This emotive meaning is powerful—persuasive—because
it can mask the need to articulate and interrogate what we mean, and
what we do.

Even the terms embedded within definitions of critical pedagogy have
strong emotive connotations. As Walton says, “a word like
‘liberation’ has positive connotations, while a word like
‘oppressed’ has negative connotations. Because of the lingering
of this emotive meaning, the respondent is covertly persuaded” to
react a certain way (118). As new instructors and graduate students
are introduced to the tenets of critical pedagogy, how many of them
are likely to reject—or even question—something defined as
“emancipatory,” “egalitarian,” and “liberating”? To do
so would be to risk looking foolish, naïve, or unfeeling. This is a
perplexing situation: Many graduate students are taught critical
pedagogy without necessarily being taught to think reflexively and
“critically” about its definition. What does that mean for the
graduate students’ professional development as teachers, for the
students they will teach, and for the next generation of graduate
instructors whom they may train?

Power
over definition grants power over practice. In other words, those
with authority to distinguish between critical and uncritical
thinking (or pedagogy) wield authority over what belongs, and what
does not belong, in a critical classroom—a troubling situation for
a pedagogical approach that seeks to diminish a teacher’s
authority, not solidify it. In his critique of various practices in
English studies, Myron Tuman picks apart definitions of critical
pedagogy and notes the established binary between what is considered
critical and what is not. If teachers get to decide what “critical”
means, he writes, “[i]s this anything more than the traditional
claim of teachers who want to pass on their knowledge and wisdom to
their students?” (6).

Tuman’s
question touches on the danger of unrecognized agency. We may be
content to think of critical pedagogy as student-centered, liberating
education, and leave it at that, but the power we have won’t
disappear just because we choose to ignore it. In Teachers,
Discourses, and Authority in the Postmodern Composition Classroom,
Xin Liu Gale argues that many compositionists adhere to the
“unrealistic assumption” that the “teacher can choose to
abandon the institutional authority that oppresses students and
reproduces inequality” (34). Gale contends that authority is
“always indispensible” (and potentially dangerous) and that
misunderstanding the indispensible nature of authority “may lead to
progressive teachers’ misguided belief that, once they have
abandoned institutional authority in their theories and pedagogies .
. .they are then free from the risks of oppressing their students
with their authority” (34). To ignore instructor authority in the
classroom, she suggests, may increase the risk of inadvertently
exerting that authority in unproductive or harmful ways. Gale
concludes that “compositionists need to recognize the complexity of
the teacher’s authority and the context in which it is used”
(34).

Definitions in Action

I’ve
stated that we’ve developed a kind of “natural attitude” toward
critical pedagogy and its definitions, which is not surprising given
how crucial it is to the work that many compositionists and other
educators do. This attitude becomes problematic, however, when we
think about the discourse communities involved when we go about
implementing critical
pedagogy. In the classroom, there is a mix of (at least) three
different discourse communities—the academic, the student, and the
public (itself an underdeveloped term sometimes used simply as a foil
for the academic community). I separate student
from public because I
see the student discourse community as being in a unique and tense
position. It draws its identity from the public (from which it
came), the academic community (toward which it moves and from which
it receives instruction), and the larger undergraduate community
(with which it spends the majority of its time). The students are
theoretically meant to be intimately involved in critical pedagogy,
as critical co-investigators who share responsibility for their
education. But would most students define themselves
this way?

Many
college students, understandably, see their coursework in the context
of a “successful” college education—getting good grades,
preparing for a good job, and so forth. In Collision
Course, Russel K. Durst notes that students
often have very pragmatic, pre-professional goals for their courses
that are “in many ways a positive quality. As individuals,
students are motivated in their studies in large part by a desire to
achieve the level of academic success necessary to enter their chosen
fields” (174). Composition classes in particular carry with them
the idea that they are requirements to be filled, stepping stones
towards academic and/or professional success. Durst notes that
“first-year students typically enter composition with an idea of
writing and an understanding of what they need to learn about writing
that are dramatically at odds with the views and approaches of
teachers” (2). As a result, students are sometimes blamed or
dismissed for the “utilitarian” attitude they have towards their
classes.

There
is also a gap between the stated goals for composition courses
(especially required first-year writing) at many institutions and the
liberatory goals of many critical pedagogues, and this gap
contributes to differences between why a
first-year composition student thinks she is in the class, and why
her instructor may think she is in the class. To look at it on a
larger scale, students are told that they are
taking first-year composition because they need certain skills in
order to be successful in college. For example, the University of
Michigan, where I taught for many years, has this to say about the
course in its online description: “The goal of the First-Year
Writing Requirement is to prepare students for the type of writing
most often assigned and valued in University classes.”{3}
Students are told that they are enrolling in this course to gain
academic survival skills. Would they guess that our goals in a
required writing course are also focused on responsible citizenship
and justice?{4}

I’m
clearly running into the difficulty of “us versus them,” placing
students and teachers in opposing, stable groups. It is a binary so
firmly entrenched that it is hard to avoid its influence even as I
will myself to write against it. I want to highlight this binary as
I now move into a discussion of student empowerment, because its very
entrenchment in discussions of critical pedagogy signifies how
difficult it is to create a fertile space for empowerment.

I had never truly considered empowerment to be a problematic point
until I asked students in a first-year writing course at the
University of Michigan to do an in-class writing in response to the
question, “Can writing be empowering?” I was surprised to
discover that more than half of my students either didn’t know or
weren’t sure what empowerment meant. Being unfamiliar with the
term is not the same as being unfamiliar with the concept, of course,
but it still strikes me as odd that a term used so frequently among
teachers to describe what should happen in a writing course could be
foreign to students enrolled in the course. If empowerment had only
to do with a theoretical interest in composition pedagogy, it could
be argued that it rightly belongs in the realm of teacher discourse.
Empowerment, however, is something we want to see happen
in and/or for our students, and this makes its translation into
classroom discourse crucial.

If students do not know our terms, as was the case in my classroom,
why don’t they know them? Most likely they
don’t know because their instructors have not drawn attention to
them. If we leave out these terms, we have made a choice regarding
what students should, or need, to know—e.g., “empowerment”
belongs to teacher discourse; it has been discussed for
rather than with students.
Such a language practice collides with the elements of “empowerment”
and “co-construction of knowledge” embedded in our notions of
critical pedagogy.

This
collision disrupts critical pedagogy’s translation from theory to
practice. In Talking Back,
bell hooks states that “[w]e must envision the university as a
central site for revolutionary struggle, a site where we can work to
educate for critical consciousness, where we can have a pedagogy of
liberation” (31), but who we count as part of that “we” is a
key question, I think. How many students believe that they are
working towards their own liberation? How many students would even
have a clear sense of what hooks means by “liberation”?

Students
left out of the process of defining critical pedagogy are left to
accept what we give them—what we have determined constitutes
empowerment, critical thinking, responsible citizenship, fair
critique of dominant power structures, and so on. This is a crucial
point: even in well-known discussions and case-studies on critical
pedagogy such as in David Seitz’ Who Can
Afford Critical Consciousness?,{5} Ira Shor’s When
Students Have Power,{6} and Russel K. Durst’s
Collision Course,{7}
we find no instances
of instructors collaboratively defining the terms of critical
pedagogy with their students. This means that the movement toward
“critical consciousness” is ultimately limited by teachers’
retention of definitional power. As a result, it is less likely that
students will experience education as the “revolutionary struggle”
that hooks calls for. They are more likely either not to recognize
this dimension of our pedagogy at all, or to resist what strikes them
as our personal ideologies shoehorned into writing instruction.

The Politics of Composition

It
is difficult to read a substantial body of composition theory without
picking up on the strong political dimension of the field. The
precise political view might vary from theorist to theorist, but many
address politics directly and see education as inherently political.
We recognize education’s ability to reproduce systems of
hierarchical power, when it “fail[s] to provide an account for why
and how some discourses, knowledges and texts ‘count’ more than
others” (Luke 312); and we hold education up as an institution
which has the potential to create more egalitarian social relations
(Cazden; Sleeter; Anderson; Giroux). Beth Daniell goes so far as to
say that “few disciplines are as blatantly political as composition
is—departmentally, institutionally, nationally” (128).

If the politicization of composition is well known to those in the
field, we must ask why this politicization is often undisclosed to
other groups, students in particular. Many people, including some
students, parents, and cultural critics, not only do not see
composition as political, but specifically want it not
to be.

A well-documented example of the tension surrounding composition as a
political subject comes from Linda Brodkey’s proposed—and
ultimately rejected—course at the University of Texas-Austin in
1990. In what became a heated and, certainly political, battle,
composition and its purposes were scrutinized as academic work made a
surprising leap into the public domain. This case reveals the
complexity of depicting composition as blatantly political. It
raises complicated questions about the relationship of the academy to
the public, about the authority to make political decisions in a
required course, and about the fear of bias, power, and
indoctrination. Its status as a requirement puts composition in a
tough position politically, because students who are “forced” to
be there can be looked at as captive to a professor’s personal
ideology. At the same time, many compositionists have devoted a
tremendous amount of reflexive work to this very issue, in an effort
to mitigate the likelihood of such indoctrination.

Another
example of this discomfort with the blending of composition and
politics was offered to me several years ago when my mother recounted
a conversation she’d had with an undergraduate student on a flight
into Pittsburgh. It was a brief exchange, the small talk of two
passengers waiting for a plane to take off. She asked the student
what he thought of his first-year composition course. His response
was, “It’s the worst class I’ve ever taken. It’s
just the teacher feeding us a bunch of his philosophy the whole time.”

This student clearly sensed an agenda of some kind—he described the
class as not only full of “a bunch of philosophy,” but he also
specifically marked it as the teacher’s
philosophy, which was being “fed” to the students. The
instructor’s philosophical force-feeding appears to be the
explanation for the course being “the worst ever,” so it is safe
to say that this student viewed the teacher’s agenda as misplaced
and inappropriate, at best. I would guess that a student who saw
composition as inherently political would not have balked quite so
much at his teacher’s politicized stance, and might instead have
seen the “philosophy” involved as a natural element of the
course.

Maxine
Hairston suggests that a political pedagogy must be considered in
terms of its effects on students—not its ideal or envisioned
effects on them, but its practical effects, given the structure of
power present in an academic institution. Students, she is quick to
point out, are hyperaware of being evaluated and will not generally
risk taking an independent political stance, “particularly if their
radars are picking up clear signals about what their teacher’s
views are” (B1). Many students desire academic success in a course
above most everything else, and their fear of negative evaluation,
Hairston claims, will lead them to choose safety over honesty or
critical thinking.

Hairston
maintains that composition is intended to teach students to organize
their ideas and communicate them effectively, and this narrow
definition implies that political ideology is something added
on by writing instructors, rather than
inherently present in any given pedagogy. In a sense, Hairston is
making the teacher invisible even as she makes students visible.
Stick to the content, she seems to argue, and all of these nasty
political problems will go away.

Quite a few philosophers, historians, and sociologists, not to mention
composition theorists, would take issue with this assertion—among
them, Knoblauch and Brannon; Giroux; Mann; McClelland; Myers;
Schildgen; and Shor—all of whom argue for the impossibility of a
classroom, or a teacher, free from politics. Our pedagogy, some
would say, inevitably arises from ideology; the position of “teacher”
is always already steeped in political significance; education’s
current and historical link to citizenship makes it impossible to
extract from politics; and writing courses are embedded within an
ideological structure. As Richard Shaull bluntly puts it, “There
is no such thing as a neutral educational
process” (34). In a recent interview, Ira Shor affirms this idea
when he claims, “Education is politics, then, simply because it
develops students and teachers this way or that way depending on the
values underlying the learning process” (qtd. in Macrine 121). It
would seem, from this perspective, that Hairston’s implication that
writing classes can remain apolitical is impractical. A teacher is
situated politically, and her decisions about curriculum and pedagogy
will inevitably be linked to that situatedness.

The issue can’t merely be dropped there, however, because what we
do with an acknowledged lack of neutrality
becomes critically important. If teaching is political, and we can’t
help but carry our political and social identities into the classroom
with us, it may seem logical to accept that fact and go ahead with a
pedagogy that represents our own personal vision of social or
political justice. We have to teach something, so why not make it
what we hold most important, most vital in combating social problems?
Why not teach in accordance with our own values? As Douglas Walton
notes, persuasive definitions are “inevitable, and so they might as
well be turned to your own advantage” (127).

This stance allows ethical qualms about feigned neutrality to be
overlooked in the name of working towards a social or political
good—for example, the liberation of historically dominated groups.
Walton argues that “redefining terms to wrest political power from
older groups by persuasion or even coercion, is justifiable” (127),
{8}
and this is perhaps a tempting line of reasoning for instructors who
are troubled by systemic injustice and who see an opportunity for
change via their teaching—even if it means prioritizing the
instructor’s ideology over students’.

The reality is that our students, if offered the kinds of
co-constructional power I am advocating, can throw up roadblocks in
our chosen path to social justice. They can disagree, they can
persuade others to disagree, and they can leave our classrooms with
opinions that make us cringe. Thelin, for example, describes a male
student who used class discussion as an opportunity to present a
theory about women’s place in the world and men’s innate
superiority “which bordered on misogyny” (Understanding
124). In theory, we may say that we accept the expression of all
ideas as part of the educational process. In practice, that becomes
more difficult. I have heard numerous faculty members—and these
are professors and instructors that I respect and admire a great
deal—say that pursuing social justice may be worth a few ethical
qualms here and there in terms of student voice and power, suggesting
that the ends justify the means, even if those means are a bit
suspect pedagogically.

I believe that this perspective comes from a deep desire for change,
and the imperative to “get things done” is understandable.
Looking more closely, however, what does this acceptance of ethical
qualms reveal about the kind of power we’ve chosen to hold onto in
a critical classroom that is theoretically based on decentralizing
authority? We can perhaps rationalize the retention of power by
pointing to the assumptions and values that students bring with them
into our classrooms. If, for example, we see certain students
reinforcing what we view as systems of oppression, isn’t it logical
to present a different perspective? After all, if they’ve already
been influenced by “the other side”—whatever we imagine that
other side (or sides) to be—don’t they deserve to hear an
alternative?

In Ironic Encounters: Ethics, Aesthetics, and
the ‘Liberal Bias’ of Composition Pedagogy,
Jeff Pruchnic illuminates a clear problem with such a stance. He writes:

At the end of the (school)day, if such an approach is
taken as itself an ethical intervention, it must have some alibi to
explain how such a leveraging is proper, some way to validate that it
is resistance against—rather than simply another example
of—unethical interpellation. Thus, any settling by a progressive
scholar on a particular
critical frame leaves them finding their rationale in the unlikely
Hegelian “negation of a negation”: the forcing of a particular
mode of epistemic or critical valuation as primary is justified only
insofar as it is taken to be the corrective to an existing distortion
previously forced on the subject (65-66).

Trying
to provide a “corrective” to what students have encountered
elsewhere may be a well-intentioned sentiment, but it also has some
significant drawbacks. First, it incorporates an implication that we
know exactly where our students are coming from, and that we have a
firm grasp on their identities. We may, in fact, have some insight
into our students’ backgrounds, but it is dangerous to make
assumptions regarding our students’ cultural and ethical
psychology. Second, if our mindset is that we need to “give” or
“provide” something for our students in terms of politics, and we
are deciding what they “need,” aren’t we edging toward an
authoritarian model of education that critical pedagogy is designed
to work against (Freire 72)? The question becomes whether we are
willing to risk this slide toward authoritarianism in order to move
forward with our own pedagogical agenda.

Defining Our Students

Students
should be the deciding factor in answering tough questions like
these, if indeed they are the “center” of our pedagogy and we
prioritize their education and intellectual development. Students
themselves are defined in various ways in composition scholarship,
and it is worth sifting through these definitions to see how they
shape the ways that students are factored in (or not factored in) to
our pedagogical decision-making.

In some cases students are portrayed as blossoming
negotiators of power and voice (Dillon 87). In others, they are
viewed as agents with the power to resist (Harkin 280). Some
scholars present students as the next generation of active citizens
(Myers 158; Murray 121; Shor 269-70; Murphy 109-10), or as young
people just coming to a sense of selfhood and freedom (Shor 99;
Knoblauch and Brannon 167).

If we define and regard students as co-constructors of
knowledge, they will be granted a significant role in determining how
our class is run—what is discussed and how it is discussed, how
authority is distributed, and so forth. If they are co-constructors
of knowledge, their perspectives are as valued as ours, and
disagreements are an important, productive part of the learning
process—for both student and teacher. One particularly useful
conception of such a co-construction of knowledge is David Wallace
and Helen Rothschild Ewald’s notion of mutuality.
In Mutuality in the Rhetoric and Composition
Classroom, they explain that mutuality can
“be understood as teachers and students sharing the potential to
adopt a range of subject positions to establish reciprocal discourse
relations as they negotiate meaning in the classroom” (3). The
authors contend that “student participation is fundamental to
learning and meaning making. However, the degree to which students
are engaged in classroom discourse depends, to a large extent, on how
teachers exercise their considerable authority” (66).

One way that Wallace and Ewald suggest that teachers exercise their
authority is in reconstituting what they call classroom “speech
genres”—for example, by allowing students more of a voice in
classroom discussion, as well as a greater say in how those
discussions are run and which topics are discussed (34). At the same
time, they insist that “the concept of students having voice must
move beyond the basic sense of being able to express opinions and
feelings in the classroom” and that students’ contributions must
truly be valued as knowledge (32).

Though
they don’t explicitly mention the idea of co-defining key terms
with students in the classroom, the type of cooperative definitional
work I’m arguing for seems very much in keeping with Wallace and
Ewald’s vision of mutuality and the type of participatory “meaning
making” they advocate. This act of co-defining key pedagogical
terms with students in the classroom would build upon the valuable
foundation of mutuality, adding an important new dimension to Wallace
and Ewald’s useful work.

What might this co-defining look like? I imagine that it could take a
number of forms. In Critical Pedagogy: Notes
from the Real World, Joan Wink offers an
example of co-definitional work (though she does not explicitly label
it as such). In her text, she provides several definitions of the
term critical pedagogy
from former students who had completed their undergraduate work and
were preparing to start a teaching credential program; these
definitions illustrate how variable understandings of terms can be
(30). She then invites readers of her book to generate their own
definitions of critical, pedagogy, and critical
pedagogy in blank spaces embedded in pages of
her text (29-30). Readers are encouraged to create generative
definitions for each word based on “[their] own experiences”
(29). As she notes, “It takes longer this way. It is more
difficult this way. But, once you have created some meaning for
critical pedagogy yourself, you will never forget it, and you will be
able to enrich your meaning only as you learn and experience more”
(28). Though she is writing for teachers, Wink’s sentiment is
equally applicable to students. It is quicker, and simpler, for
students to be provided with (implicit or explicit) definitions; some
students would even prefer it. Co-defining, though more labor
intensive and potentially frustrating, opens the door for students
and faculty to generate meaning together—meaning that is ultimately
more enriching and memorable than material transferred from teacher
to student.

However,
if students are perceived as potential threats to our pedagogical
goals, their perspectives are more likely to be viewed as obstacles
to overcome, and disagreements are more likely perceived as bouts
between competitors. Given the institutional authority of the
instructor, which makes any “competition” somewhat unfair,
students situated in this way are likely to find their ability to
influence the classroom greatly diminished.

This particular act of defining comes down, finally, to an issue of trust.
Do we actually have faith in our students’ ability to make good
choices for themselves through a classroom governed by a
participatory pedagogy? Freire stresses the importance of faith in
our students when he notes that a “real humanist can be identified
more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle,
than by a thousand actions in their favor without that trust” (60).
Yet, the concept of trust is in some ways at odds with proceeding
with a pedagogy that seeks action and change. Trust in other people
can require the relinquishment of control. It implies partnership.
It cancels out self-sufficiency, makes things messier and more
complicated, and creates a greater potential for frustration and
impasse. It finishes the phrase “If you want something done
right…” with “you can’t
do it yourself.”

Trust
comes at a price, then. Giving our students a greater role in
defining the work of our courses—and, as a result, a bigger say in
establishing the specific goals of the course—provides them a more
direct way of attacking or resisting the goals we hold most dear, if
they are so inclined. It opens us up to the possibility of
antagonism and rejection and can potentially create a classroom
environment that feels counter-productive to the kinds of change we’d
like to see. I would argue that this potential threat to our vision
of the critical classroom is a necessary one, however, since critical
pedagogy is so uniquely intended to establish space for students to
have such agency in their own education. It is a point at which
theory becoming practice can be frightening, precisely because our
theory shifts some of the control to our students. We can’t always
anticipate what will happen, a necessary condition highlighted by
Thelin when he writes:

If everything in a critical classroom worked as well as
some accounts of critical pedagogy make it seem . . . we would not
have a transformation of a classroom. We would have a recasting of
the typical hero model of teaching, where the instructor rescues
students in need of saving . . . Some unpleasant moments must spring
from attempts to implement critical pedagogy, then, and instructors
have found that the consequences of differing democratic, progressive
pedagogies are hard to anticipate (Understanding 127).

These
“unpleasant moments”—uncomfortable as they may be for
instructors—can also be some of the most productive moments and can
allow for students to experience education as an empowering process.
In teaching a class centered in on the theme of Utopia, Ira Shor
encountered student resistance to the topic and seemed to thrive on
it. In When Students Have Power,
he writes:

Students expressed doubts about the idea and purpose of
Utopia, even the study of it! These questions had an attitude about
them, which is good because the students were emerging into the
material, not memorizing or mimicking my take on it. They were
challenging me to prove that Utopia was of human value and curricular
value. That’s a worthy challenge for students to pose to their
teachers on the first day of class, not taking the material for
granted, not easing back . . . and waiting to be told what to think
(54-55).

Shor delights in the fact that his students are questioning the very
purpose of the course, because this questioning demonstrates critical
engagement in their own education—the students are learning to
critique, to break away from passivity.

There
is no way for Shor to control whether or not his students end up
thinking the same way he does about Utopia and its relation to social
and political issues. Some of his students could pass the class,
fill the requirement, and never put into practice what Shor had in
mind when he designed the course. This state of not knowing is
significant to note because it is another problematic intersection of
theory and practice. Once we take the initial step of trusting our
students as critical thinkers, we have to accept that we can’t
predict or control the outcomes of their experience in our
classrooms, any more than we can ensure that they will finish our
course with a love for language and writing. As Shor indicates,
relinquishing control (or a pretense of control) creates an
atmosphere of freedom for our students, but it also allows us to
learn in new and unexpected ways.

An
important means of exhibiting trust in our students is by loosening
our grip on our definitions of core terms, by relinquishing a degree
of the power we wield over our pedagogical language. In When
Words Lose Their Meaning, J.B. White
describes language as being “in part a system of invention” and
adds that “[s]ome of these inventions are shared with others and
become common property” (8). Critical pedagogy is a continuous
invention that cries out for this kind of communal ownership. Making
critical pedagogy “common property” grants students the
opportunity to disrupt and challenge it. More importantly, though,
it grants them a greater stake in determining what the writing
classroom is for and allows them to invest more fully in their own
education.

Notes

I recognize the rhetorical difficulty of employing “we” here,
especially since those who consider themselves critical pedagogues
may have varying reasons for defining themselves that way. For the
purposes of this discussion, “we” will refer to college
composition instructors who are committed to critical pedagogy.
(The reasons for this commitment lead to a different discussion, and
will therefore be left aside.) Like any other grouping based on
selected characteristics, “we” is an imperfect construction; it
is also, I think, a necessary construction in a study of practice
that is widely accepted even among very different individuals. (Return to text.)

I am referring here to graduate students (in literature, creative
writing, and other fields) and faculty who may or may not have
training in composition theory or critical pedagogy. (Return to text.)

Gorzelsky suggests that it may be a mistake to treat these goals
separately. She writes, “[W]e
should neither pursue critical pedagogy at the expense of promoting
effective classrooms nor abandon it in favor of students’
pragmatic goals. Certainly it is essential to incorporate students’
goals and interests into our courses. But to sharply prioritize
either pragmatic goals or the pursuit of critical consciousness is
to privilege a single variable at the expense of creating classrooms
that promote real learning” (81-82). (Return to text.)

In his Afterword, Seitz proposes “four necessary conditions”
that must be “active within a teacher’s critical pedagogy if she
wishes to promote students’ internal persuasion of social
critiques” (232). The second of these four conditions is asking
students “to build their own cultural and social theories, rather
than primarily apply the critical theories of others” (232). It
seems reasonable, then, that Seitz would support the idea of
students being involved in the process of defining critical
pedagogy—a theory of teaching governing their classroom
experience—even though he doesn’t discuss it in his book. (Return to text.)

In his famous discussion of a critical pedagogy course he led on the
concept of “Utopia,” Shor mentions introducing a few key
critical terms into classroom discussion. Shor writes that in one
class discussion he “named an experimental alternative to
traditional education—‘negotiating the curriculum’—for which
[he] also used synonyms like ‘power-sharing,’ ‘shared
authority,” and “cogovernance,” to indicate collaborative
decision-making, democratic deliberation over policy, and
codevelopment of the syllabus” (When 59). Though Shor
introduces and discusses these terms with students, there is no
suggestion that they were actively involved in co-constructing
the definitions, despite the student-centered, collaborative nature
of his course. (Return to text.)

Sherry Cook Stanforth, the writing instructor that Durst observed at
the University of Cincinnati as part of his research on critical
writing courses, did initiate a collaborative, definitional
activity. Students broke into groups of four and worked together to
“define and explain” various concepts for their classmates.
Rather than work to define key terms of critical pedagogy, however,
the students discussed social ideas such as “bulimia,
vegetarianism, the American family” among others (97). While such
an activity might serve as one model for how students can work
together to define key critical pedagogy terms, there is no evidence
that Stanforth’s students did this. (Return to text.)

Walton’s new dialectical view, like postmodernism, acknowledges
the inevitability of persuasive definitions; it does not, however,
“draw the postmodernist conclusion that all definitions . . . are
all equally justifiable” (127). (Return to text.)

Brodkey, Linda. Making a Federal Case out of Difference: The Politics of Pedagogy, Publicity, and Postponement.Writing Theory and Critical Theory. Ed. John Clifford and John Schilb. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1994. 236-261. Print.